On Sat, 29 Jan 2005 12:33:31 -0700, Tyler Larson fedora-devel@tlarson.com wrote:
Jamie has a point, you know. Albeit cleverly disguised amidst the sarcasm.
calling bmp half-working is a bit over the top. The question has never been is this a perfect replacement.. the question has been is it good enough. I don't feel the objections raised so far are significant barriers to replacing xmms. You are free to disagree with me ( until my army of demonic minions steal your soul and rid you of your pesky free will) but I don't think its particularly rational to expect a perfect replacement of any piece of software when the discussion turns to wholesale replacement. Replacements will have their own strengths and weaknesses that need to be compared.
Progress for progress' sake is an absurd motivation.
No one is arguing that. Progress is a messy non-linear business... trade-offs are made among a a number of factors.. 2 steps forward ...1 step back..
That is, replacing an app with a functionally inferior one just because it uses old libraries isn't sensible. If you replace an app, the new one should be *better* than the old one.
are you saying that gtk2 doesnt have improvements over gtk1? 2 steps forward... 1 step back. If you are looking for monotonic forward progress on ALL aspects ALL the time.. i envy your idealism however naive it is.
The goal isn't to make new programs better, it's to use the best programs.
Is it? I'm not particular sure that is THE goal at all. I think there are a number of competing goals which demand compromise and trade-offs. Everything has an opportunity cost.. the 'best' program 2 years from now may not be the 'best' program today.... and its an absolute WASTE of effort to continue to focus testing manhours through test-releases of core on an application that is a dead-end. If bmp is close enough, and it has a development future that appears to provide better integrations and features into the distributions long term... then its worth considering.. even though its not a perfect replacement for xmms. I think its close enough to be a replacement and that its gtk2 provides inherent benefit. Feel free to disagree.
Any decision that meets one of these lesser goals (like shrinking the distro size) but still runs contrary to the more important principle of improving the user experience is a bad decision to make. Don't destroy the forest to save a tree.
A decisions that has a significant and lasting long term benefit can cause short term negative impact. 2 steps forward.. and 1 step back.. is still progress.
-jef"doing the progress cha-cha"spaleta